It took some time to get used to the world Chris Elam and his Misnomer Dance Theater created on Friday night at Joyce SoHo. Mr. Elam, a modern dancer trained in Indonesian traditional dance, sets inarticulate bodies adrift in unknowable situations and places. Most of those bodies are not pretty in the traditional dance sense. They are crabbed and fidgety — not a straight line among them — and they're seemingly uncertain of where they are headed or why. The dances' gnomic titles and the frequently gnarled music offer little relief.

Chris Elam’s dances — his Misnomer Dance Theater opened the Summer Stages series at Concord Academy last Thursday — tend to begin with amorphous shapes that only gradually and only partially resolve into dancing humans. By the time you can identify the protuberances as arms or knees and the sloping lumps as rounded backs or necks and you start figuring out how these items are attached to one another, the whole configuration will have rearranged itself into another riddle.

Elam doesn’t seem concerned about clearing up the anatomical uncertainty he’s created. His dances don’t show us how perfection can grow out of chaos, as a more conventional choreographic rule would require. With him, chaos gropes around in search of logic but rises only to a more predictable chaos. ....

By DEBORAH JOWITT The Village Voice December 31, 2003 - January 6, 2004

Chris Elam has fashioned a distinctive, engagingly bizarre choreographic style out of a propensity for tying bodies in knots and intensive studies of Balinese dance. In his solo Tin Man, he treats his body as if it were one of those puzzles involving interlocking rings. If this part slips through here, can this then move there? He seems to stand forever on one leg figuring out strategies. In duets, any erotic implications of body parts in close conjunction are subordinate to images of clumsy tenderness, as two people use each other as seats, ladders, cradles, and mazes. Elam has casually acknowledged an aesthetic kinship with Pilobolus and Momix, but his work is odder and more intimately human.

Under a MicroscopeChris Elam's choreographic knots tell us much about ourselvesby DEBORAH JOWITT for the Village Voice

Although he and his dancers may occasionally look worried or excited as they cope with their own recalcitrant limbs, step onto a colleague to get a better view, or try to fit their angled arms into some composite shape, they behave as if all these implausible things were commonplace.

Feathery Creations Mixing the Artists With the Pigeonsby GIA KOURLAS for the New York Times

Pigeons descended. The dancers took their mark in a distant corner, and rock music by Rob Erickson began to play on loudspeakers. A loud drone of feedback sent the birds into a tizzy - in one frightened swoop they ascended to nearby branches - as the five performers followed suit, each leaning on the trunk of a tree.

Two Premieres for Chris Elam and His Misnomer Dance Theaterby JOHN ROCKWELL for the New York Times

What makes dance so wonderfully compelling is how one such assemblage of movements can seem meaningless, and another full of ritualistic intent. "Land Flat" falls firmly on the ritualistic side of the line.

...

"Throw People" is odder than "Land Flat," less alluring but more ambitious and complex. Both dances suggest that Mr. Elam is well on his way to establishing himself as an important voice in downtown (Brooklyn, in his case) dance.

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